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Entering the Turquoise Gates 29 The appearance of the campus is dated as there have been only three buildings added since it opened in 1971. The building interiors resemble an aging urban high school with high-tech retrofits.The classrooms are cramped, holding no more than twenty-five students. The unintended benefit to students is small classes with a low teacher-to-student ratio. A detrimental aspect of the buildings is that some of the classrooms are designed without doors, and the walls of all the rooms are made of fiberboard and do not reach the interior of the roof. Noise travels freely from room to room. (I came to a long-standing agreement with another faculty member, who is as adept at projecting his voice as I am, that we would actively lobby not to have adjoining classrooms.) Positive changes to the campus has been implemented more recently as both cosmetic and structural work was initiated all across the campus. Warped plastic windows were replaced with energy-efficient ones, small patches of xeriscaping were planted, and streetlights and a sidewalk now lead from the street to the dormitories so students no longer have to walk in the gutter on their way into campus. The most significant change to the campus is the addition of three new buildings. In 2001, the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute Museum and Cultural Learning Center was erected adjacent to the administration building.The log cabin building was donated as a kit with numbered logs by the Kellogg Foundation. All tribal colleges received these kits, allowing each school to choose the building design they felt was most appropriate to their school. SIPI’s building resembles a traditional eight-sided Navajo dwelling, called a hogan, so it is universally known as the Hogan. The choice of the building structure is far more laden with meaning for students than campus employees must have expected when they designed it. The Science and Technology Building was completed in 2003 with more than 72,000 square feet of laboratory, office, and classroom space. Its groundbreaking ceremony took place two years prior and was attended by a variety of New Mexico’s political figures.The Science and Technology Building has laboratory space for classes in chemistry, biology, robotics, electronics, and lasers. The view from the building is a spectacular vista that encompasses a grassy field and the Bosque. Beyond the river, and filling the windows although they are more than ten miles away, are the Sandia Mountains. Every hour that the building is open, students are in the study lounge reading or sprawled in chairs.The view from the building also takes in the backyard llama corral of a house directly beyond the parking lot. Students expressed affection for the llamas (even alerting me when one of them died), but gave 30 Chapter 1 them a wide berth, having learned the hard way that angry llamas will spit. Most recently, a new child care facility was built on campus in 2007 but, as of this writing, is not yet in operation. The Conflict Between Institutional Models As briefly described earlier in this chapter, SIPI has an unusual organizational model, and seems to have more conflicts about its nature than its sister school, Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. The members of the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute community do not operate under a shared set of institutional values because of the school’s incomplete meshing of organizational models and incompatible institutional rules and goals. Colleges are a type of community, which, like all communities , by their very nature, share a mission and a purpose. This means that, at most colleges, conflict in the system is an aberration (Tierney 1992:28–29). For SIPI, institutional conflict is not an aberration, but a constant state of being. Because the institution has not harmonized its opposing parts, and is subsequently in perpetual conflict with itself, students cannot integrate themselves easily into the institution. Failure to integrate into a college socially and intellectually leads to a failure to persist (Tierney 1992:23).To suc2 . A view of the Science and Technology Building. Photo courtesy of the author. Entering the Turquoise Gates 31 ceed, students must find a way to make the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute work for them and bridge the institutional conflicts. SIPI struggles to mesh four institutional models: community college, federal installation, BIA educational institution, and tribal college. SIPI is a community college, and strives to incorporate a community college’s attendant values and...

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